Nonsense and Language

The Alice books are the most serious nonsense ever written. Carroll — a logician by trade — built jokes that turn out to be theories: of meaning, of language, of how words hook onto the world.

The portmanteau

Carroll’s most famous linguistic invention arrives in Looking-Glass, when Humpty Dumpty explains “Jabberwocky”: “slithy” is “lithe and slimy” — “two meanings packed up into one word.” He calls such words portmanteaus, after the traveling case with two compartments. The idea — that a word can carry two meanings fused at the syllable — entered linguistics itself; the term “portmanteau word” is now standard, and Carroll coined it. “Mimsy” is “flimsy and miserable”; “frumious” is “fuming and furious.” The joke became a tool.

Logic games

Dodgson taught logic at Oxford, and the books are full of logic taken for a walk:

• The Cheshire Cat’s proof of madness (Wonderland, Chapter 6): dogs growl when angry and wag their tails when pleased; the Cat does the reverse; therefore the Cat is mad — and by extension everyone here. The form is valid; the premises are the reader’s problem.
• Tweedledee’s logic (Looking-Glass, Chapter 4): “Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.” A parody of hypothetical reasoning that is, technically, impeccable.
• The trial (Wonderland, Chapters 11–12): every rule of evidence and procedure is followed with total precision to reach conclusions that are total nonsense — “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.” It is the form of justice emptied of its content.

Parody verse

Carroll was a brilliant parodist, and the books smuggle in rewritten versions of poems every Victorian child knew:

• “You are old, Father William” rewrites Robert Southey’s pious “The Old Man’s Comforts” into a young man’s interrogation of a spry, back-somersaulting elder.
• “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat” rewrites Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” as the Hatter’s murdered performance.
• “Will you walk a little faster?” — the Lobster Quadrille song — rewrites Mary Botham Howitt’s moral “The Spider and the Fly.”
• “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and “Jabberwocky” are originals in period style — the latter so convincing that readers keep trying to translate it.

The parodies work two ways: funny if you know the original, and funny if you don’t — the verses stand alone as nonsense, and double as jokes for the knowing.

Humpty Dumpty’s theory of meaning

The deepest passage in either book is also the funniest. Humpty Dumpty claims words mean whatever he chooses — “neither more nor less” — and when Alice objects that words can’t mean so many different things, he answers: “The question is, which is to be master — that’s all.” Philosophers of language have been arguing about that sentence for a century: is meaning fixed by convention, or by the speaker’s will? Carroll stages the whole debate in a nursery dialogue, on top of a wall, with an egg.

Why the nonsense matters

Victorian children’s books mostly taught lessons. Carroll’s nonsense refuses to — and in refusing, it teaches something larger: that language is a game with rules, that rules can be bent, and that bending them is how you find out what they were for. Children laugh at the jokes; adults discover the jokes were about them. That double audience is why the books are still read at every age.

Source notes

• The portmanteau explanation and “which is to be master”: Looking-Glass, Chapter 6.
• The madness proof: Wonderland, Chapter 6; Tweedledee’s logic: Looking-Glass, Chapter 4; the trial procedure: Wonderland, Chapters 11–12.
• Parody originals identified: Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts,” Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” Howitt’s “The Spider and the Fly” — standard scholarly attributions.

Limitations

• Carroll never published a theory of nonsense; the readings above are the critical consensus, attributed as interpretation.
• Some “explanations” of Jabberwocky words beyond Humpty’s own are later inventions, not Carroll’s.